Mon Feb 08, 2010 at 14:19

Despite all the talk about Scott Brown bringing an end to the Democratic Senate supermajority, the truth is that Senate Democrats never had a filibuster-proof supermajority. They weren't even close.

A look at Senate voting habits shows that it takes only 54 Republican Senators to reach 60 votes for conservative legislation, while it takes 72 Democratic Senators to reach 60 votes for progressive legislation. While the last sentence sounds like snark, it isn't). Democratic Senators vote with Republicans significantly more often than Republican Senators vote with Democrats, making it much easier for Republicans to pass the kind of legislation they want.

According to Progressive Punch, looking only at "crucial votes," the average Democratic Senator has voted with the progressive position 82.4% of the time over the course of their entire career. By contrast, looking only at crucial votes, the average Republican Senator has voted with the progressive position 3.5% of the time throughout their entire career.

If there was no filibuster, and only 51 votes were required to pass legislation in the Senate, Democrats require 59 votes to hold the slimmest of majorities (50.1 effective votes), and even then they only hold the majority if a Democrat is Vice-President. So, even without the filibuster, passing progressive legislation such as card check, the public option, and cramdown would have been fraught with nailbiters in 2009-2010.

These numbers present an interesting series of choices for Democrats and progressives who want to get rid of the filibuster. Let's game it out:

Under current rules, a progressive majority in the Senate is impossible. Democrats will never win 72 seats in any of our lifetimes. This means that, as long as the 60-vote filibuster is in place, there will never be a progressive majority in the Senate.

Without the filibuster, non-Progressives will have a nearly permanent Senate majority. It only takes 42 Republican Senators to form an anti-progressive majority in the Senate even if the filibuster is destroyed. So, even if the filibuster is destroyed, the Senate will have a non-progressive majority roughly every 17 out of 20 years.

With the filibuster, progressives can block legislation if there are 47 or more Democratic Senators. While the filibuster denies any hope of a progressive majority in the Senate, more often than not it allows progressives to block anti-progressive legislation as along as there are 47 or more Democratic Senators.

The main choice is thus between:

Never having a progressive majority and usually being able to block anti-progressive legislation,

Occasionally having a progressive majority and rarely being able to block anti-progressive legislation.

While #2 puts conservatives in unimpeded charge of the Senate more often than #1, it is still the better choice for progressives. This is because #2 at least offers a chance of passing progressive legislation, while #1 does not.

#1 blocks anti-progressive legislation more often than #2, but it still does not actually stop it. It is simply a slower erosion of progressive public policy, with no hope of reversal.

If you are a progressive, unless you got into politics just to slow down the corporate capture of the federal government, getting rid of the filibuster is a smart move. A progressive majority in the Senate simply impossible as long as it exists.

I'm so tired of hearing the Democrats whine that they are unable to accomplish anything because the Republicans "might" filibuster. Yet the Democrats never put the Republicans feet to the fire, force them to filibuster, no bathroom breaks, and make them do in public what they threaten to do in private.

I think the truth is that the Democrats don't want to do anything to help the people. The basic fact is that the Democrats are in office because they raised millions of dollars to get there, were millionaires before their elections, and can use their positions to become obscenely wealthy and powerful for the rest of their lives. But to do that, they must play ball with the big boys. The leaders in congress tell each member that they must bring in a certain amount of money, must support the corporate playbook, not ruffle feathers of their donors, in order to stay as an insider. The entire system is corrupt. We can't change that until we can stop these people from taking bribes.

How can that happen? I would say assess a tax on all campaign donations, say 90%. Tax it like alcohol or cigarettes under the theory that it is unhealthy for society. I believe the standard of review for a tax would be "rationally related" to some reasonable purpose. The reasonable purpose would be to provide financing for a public-finance campaign system.

Wasn't it obvious last summer? The Republicans were allowed to go across the country holding their silly death-panel forums, having their supporters brandish weapons at other citizens to terrorize them, to spread lies to the public and undermine support for healthcare reform. The Democrats did nothing to counter that. If the Democrats wanted to help the people, they would need to get off their lazy corrupt asses and get out and rally the people behind them. They would go into the districts of blue dogs, organize the people, and tell the blue dogs that if they don't vote for real reform, the party will support a challenger next time around.

If it was the spouse, child or parent of a Senator who was going to die from a lack of affordable healthcare, I suspect these Senators would have done something, made an effort. Possibly not.

But electing more corrupt Democrats is not the answer. I think putting pressure on the Democrats and all politicians to end the system of bribery and corruption is the only way to change the system. They don't work for us. They work for the corporations. The Democratic politicians think of us as their groupies, or fans: they do nothing for us but expect us to gather together to cheer them and throw money at them whenever they deign to leave their palaces and mingle with the common folk.

"The basic fact is that the Democrats are in office because they raised millions of dollars to get there"

It isn't really the candidates who raise money anymore, it's now their ideology and/or past voting record that earn the big dollars. Shumer used to brag how he wielded the DSCC purse money as a club to force votes donors wanted. He and Emanuel both starved candidates and members who didn't play ball to appease donors.

Menendez and Van Hollen know what the Court's action means. Left leaning Dems are likely to be in bigger trouble than ever before because the roots can't compete with Wall Street.

Nationalism is not the same thing as terrorism, and an adversary is not the same thing as an enemy.

and requires 60 to stop him. The rules no longer require a Senator to talk nonstop (if it ever did). It only requires that one senator stand up and say something like "are there 60 votes to stop the debate?" If there are not 60 votes, then the "debate" continues.

In 1975, the Senate reduced the number of votes needed to invoke cloture to three-fifths (60) of Senate membership. At the same time, they made the filibuster "invisible" by requiring only that 41 Senators state that they intend to filibuster; critics say this makes the modern filibuster "painless."

And the reason why is the result of a compromise in Senate rules in the 1970s that lowered the filibuster threshold required from 2/3 to 3/5 (ie, from 67 Senators to the current 60). But, also changed was the fact that the new rules require 3/5 of ALL senators, while the old rule require 2/3 of all senators present. It's just one little word taken out of the rule, but the change fundamentally altered the incentive structure that made the filibuster what it was.

You see, under the old Rule, the majority essentially laid seige on the minority, which had to physically stand up and hold the floor in order to prevent "2/3 of all Senators present" from moving on the blocked legislation. Thus, as soon as 2/3 were present in the chamber in favor of ending the filibuster they could immediately move to do so as soon as the minority surrendered the floor. Thus, it was a game of waiting them out...

Under the new rule, the minority doesn't have any incentive to hold the floor. It doesn't matter if Senator McConnell is living it up in the tropics. Or whether Al Franken is seated or not. But suddenly it does matter if Ted Kennedy's health is bad that day or if your Senator from South Dakota suddenly has to have brain surgery. Even though they would otherwise be "yes" votes, their absence makes them effectively a "no" on cloture votes in their absence. It still takes 3/5 of "all Senators." Thus, there is no reason for the minority to try to hold the floor because it no longer matters whether they do or not. They have to get to 60, not just a fraction of those present. So, there is no reason for the GOP to actually be present in order to successfully block legislation. Their vote is effectively a "no" until they show up to vote "yes."

is designed to discourage their use. The Court has held that campaign contributions are, in some senses, free speech. Laws taken to discourage that would not get rationality review - they would almost certainly be struck down, regardless of what justifications were offered. It's true that taxation would usually get rationality review, but this tax would not.

There is no reason why you couldn't increase corporate taxes to pay for public funded elections.

Politics is the art of the possible, but that means you have to think about changing what is possible, not that you have to accept it in perpetuity.

Chris, while your math makes sense I think you're potentially drawing the wrong conclusion from this data. What it should be suggesting to you is that Republicans are simply better at being Republicans than Democrats are at being Democrats. The solution is not to try and secure 59 votes or 72 or however many votes, but to elect better Democrats. While I'm not sure what it means for the Senate majority (which, while basically unable to pass important legislation is still important as far as setting the legislative calendar and also Supreme court nominees), a whole bunch of the problematic Senators are probably going to lose in November. While it sucks that they're going to be replaced with Republicans and we'll have to wait at minimum another 6 years for a shot at those seats, well, hopefully we can actually get better Democrats in there at some point.

So while the filibuster probably needs to be reformed, I don't think the two choices you present here are accurate.

Being part of the Party don't mean the same thing for a Democrat and a Republican in office
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The GOP went through a civil war in the mid-1960s, with Barry's Boys defeating the traditional base of northeastern, liberal, Rockefeller Republicans. Although they weren't routed out of the Party in one, fell swoop (the GOP Party Platform endorsed the ERA into the 1970s), their days were numbered. And we're now in a place where people in the GOP take reactionism and strict adherence to Party authority very seriously.

The Dems have never had that civil war. I suppose 1972 might have been one, but the McGovern folks didn't rout their enemies, and many of them ended up abandoning the cause and more or less joining the other side in the Party civil war, anyway (e.g. Bill Clinton).

In fact, to the extent that there's been an ideological purge in the Democratic Party, it's been the center-right that's defeated the left, whereas in the GOP the center-right lost to the far right.

It's not a matter of electing a handful of good people. You'd need to declare war on the Party itself in order to win a hostile takeover, if you wanted to emulate the GOP. And that's nearly impossible to do when your party has any power in DC, because too many interests have a good reason to support the incumbents.

As you said, it was between the centrist New Democrats and the leftist... what, Old Democrats? New Deal Democrats? Real Liberals? And the New Democrats mostly won. I thought that the nomination of Barack Obama over Hillary Clinton was a triumph of the Real Left over the New Dems/DLC, but it turns out Obama is a New Dem himself.

So, we need to do with the Democratic Party what Goldwater conservatives did with the Republican Party: take it back.

According to Chris's latest Senate forecast, Democrats are slated to lose in 11 contests. Who are they and what kind of Democrats are they (you'll have to forgive the crude and imprecise labeling)?

PA: Arlen Specter or Joe Sestak. Specter is an actual ConservaDem (though a flip-floppity one) and Sestak seems to be a New Dem.

AR: Blanche Lincoln - ConservaDem. (I don't know much about Bill Halter who may or may not run, but I'm guessing he's more New Dem.)

OH: Lee Fisher, New Dem, or Jennifer Brunner, Real Liberal. A Brunner loss would be very painful.

CO: Michael Bennet or Andrew Romanoff, both seem to be New Dems.

NV: Harry Reid, New Dem and weak Majority Leader.

NC: Elaine Marshall or Cal Cunningham, both are (AFAIK) New Dems.

FL: Kendrick Meek, New Dem.

NH: Paul Hodes, New Dem.

KY: Jack Conway or Dan Mongiardo, while I've heard Conway to be significantly more liberal than Mongiardo I think they're both New Dem at best (is Mongiardo a ConservaDem?).

DE: Chris Coons, not sure what he is (probably New Dem).

ND: Don't think we even have a candidate yet.

Not to mention, in LA a ConservaDem (Charlie Melancon) will likely lose in a blowout.

There are also two marginal races where the Democrat is either tied or has a slim lead. They are:

IL: Alexi Giannoulias, probably New Dem?

MO: Robin Carnahan, New Dem.

So that's 14 contests and 18 total Democratic candidates that are on the line. Of those 18, only 1 (Brunner in OH) is a certifiable Real Liberal, which is both good news and bad news, really. But the real bad news is that only 3 (Specter, Lincoln, and Melancon) are certifiable ConservaDems. Even if you lump in Harry Reid as a candidate that liberals would be better off without, that's still only 4 "desired losers".

That means that 14 of 18 candidates that will probably lose are not bad apples, but decent if uninspiring mainstream Democrats. So this won't be a cathartic release, unfortunately, but a real loss where okay Democrats will be replaced by some potentially terrible Republicans (e.g. Pat Toomey in PA, Marco Rubio in FL).

that I have here. I don't know how updated this version of the list is; the last update on it is our FL Senate candidate Kendrick Meek withdrawing his cosponsorship on October 21 2009 (which seems to reinforce my classification of him as a "meek" New Dem).

No mention of Medicare for All on Hodes's Senate campaign page either, though he does mention support for the public option.

2012 will bring us a lot more too that will have a good chance of losing.

Again, I don't like the whole "lose to win" thing, but some of them are just inevitable right now. I'll be wanting the Dem to win most of the races you mention, but won't cry too much when Lincoln, Bayh, and likely Reid loses. At this point, while I'd prefer Sestak to Specter (and actually considering the anti-incumbent trend this year think he'd have a better shot at winning), I'd still rather one of them win in PA... Yeah, Specter is obviously a political chameleon, but at least he's been voting pretty well now... The trick will be to keep him voting well even after the primary is over... if he doesn't, then yeah, I won't care about him losing either.

I don't like "lose to win" either, but if we're going to be losing Democrats anyway, we need to see what kind of Democrats they are, and try to confine the losses to ConservaDems and the gains to liberals/progressives. Unfortunately, what this shows is that despite a lot of hopeful talk around these parts that our 2010 losses will sweep out a lot of ConservaDems, that doesn't seem to be the case here.

Perhaps we should be thankful that only a relatively few actual liberals are running this year, and we should be concentrating our efforts on them: Brunner, maybe Tasini, Winograd and a few others (Hanabusa, Thomas) in the House. The ConservaDems and New Dems can take care of themselves.

As for PA, a primary challenge-free Specter will be a ConservaDem. Sestak is 100% of the reason Specter has been on good behavior this past year, and as soon as he's gone Specter will be free to return to his centrist/moderate conservative roots. (Hell, he could try returning to the Republican caucus if he wants to.) I'm not saying that I'd rather have Toomey, but what I am saying is that we should treat Specter as we would a ConservaDem - don't go out of our way to defeat them, but don't help them either.

A Republican, or a Democrat who does nothing but enable Republicans? One will shoot you in the facr. The other will load the gun. Americans are sick of having their faces shot off, thank you very much, and if that means taking away the GOP's stooges no matter how reliable some of them may be some of the time one day in the distant future, then so be it. We need progressives, not Republican enablers. A polite robber is still a robber.

"Given the choice between a Republican and someone who acts like a Republican, people will vote for the real Republican all the time." -- Harry S. Truman

The dmn teabaggers have lot of success with brining GOP
Senaators into party line, and make them pass a purity test. Why shouldn't progressiuve be able to do the same? Why should we act as if corrupt Senators selling out to rethuglicans is a law of nature, and can't be prevented?

Really, I don't like the apparent defeatism behind this, that all we can do is getting acussotmed to this crap. Hell, if that's true, then let's simply give up!

Your analysis is good and I agree with your conclusion, but I have to disagree vociferously with this defeatist (and depressing) statement:

Under current rules, a progressive majority in the Senate is impossible. Democrats will never win 72 seats in any of our lifetimes. This means that, as long as the 60-vote filibuster is in place, there will never be a progressive majority in the Senate.

This is true only if Democrats continue to vote for progressive policy only 82.4% of the time and Republicans only vote for progressive policy 3.5% of the time. But the whole point of our More and Better Democrats strategy is that we defeat Republicans in conservative states who seldom vote for progressive policies (less than 10% of the time) and replace them with Democrats who will do so at least 60-70% of the time, and we replace ConservaDems in moderate/liberal states who only vote for progressive policies 60-70% of the time with strong progressives who will vote for progressive policies 90-100% of the time. And by doing that we also scare a few more Senators to vote with us than would otherwise.

It seems unlikely now, but if the 2010 election were favorable to progressives and led to the defeat of just one or two of the worst Republicans and the replacement of one or two ConservaDems with progressives, the Senate would shift such that we would could occasionally win even with the filibuster in place and we'd certainly be able to block anti-progressive legislation.

We are now faced with massive fight-back from the power elite. President Obama -- with his Eisenhower policies and his undercutting of progressives and support for conservatives -- has greatly contributed to their effort. But the people who elected President Obama still want "change we can believe in." If we can mobilize that energy again for a few more election cycles, it is still possible to shift the Senate in our direction and implement progressive policies with or without the filibuster (though easier without it).

I still think there is reasonable possibility of replacing Ohio Senator Voinovich with Jennifer Brunner this cycle who is likely to vote similarly to Senator Sherrod Brown. This one change would replace someone who votes progressive just 9.92% of the time on crucial progressive votes with someone who is likely to vote 96.62% of the time with us.

will be a bright spot in this otherwise dim election year, just as Barack Obama was the bright spot of a dismal 2004 (ha, look how that turned out!). As far as I can tell, she's the only non-New Democrat, "Real Liberal" non-incumbent running for Senate. (Joe Sestak is important too, but seems to still be a New Democrat "regular liberal" rather than a Real Liberal.)

The filibuster serves no useful purpose. As originally conceived, it allowed a minority of Senators to continue "debate" indefinitely thereby preventing a vote: but it wasn't really about debate, since the what was required was not debate but just talk. That's why you could read recipes or the telephone book. In essence, this rule masqueraded as being about protecting the ability of the minority to be heard, but it really just gave a minority of Senators a non-constitutional veto.

But since the revision of rule 22 in 1975, even that tenuous justification is gone. Now, Senators don't even need to talk in order to maintain a filibuster. They don't need to do anything. The onus in on the majority to round up the 60 votes.

For some, talk of the filibuster is a distraction from the real issue - Democrats pretending to be powerless, when they are really conservative. But that is a distraction - whether the filibuster is used by Republicans to stop weak willed Democrats from doing the right thing, or by Democrats to engage in kubuki in order to maintain the support of both their corporate masters and progressives, ultimately its the same problem. The filibuster has no legitimate purpose, and prevents the citizenry from keeping their elected officials accountable. It is undemocratic and empowers Washington insiders and corporate elites to the detriment of the people.

We can attack the filibuster and at the same time demand better behavior from Democratic Senators and seek to have Republicans pay a price for obstructionism. We can do that because ultimately the message - that the Senate should be democratically accountable to the people - is the same.

Politics is the art of the possible, but that means you have to think about changing what is possible, not that you have to accept it in perpetuity.

Progressives are concentrated in large, urban states. But they have fewer votes in the Senate because small, rural states are over-represented. In 2000, for example, despite the fact that Gore narrowly outpolled Bush in the Electoral College, Bush won 30 states to Gore's 20. What this means is that any Democratic Senate majority will almost certainly have to rely on senators elected from red states. By contrast, Republicans can, theoretically, have a solid majority consisting ONLY of senators from Republican-leaning, conservative states.

This doesn't negate issues of corporate control, big money, etc. But keep in mind that the small-state bias also impacts corporate control because smaller states tend to have higher degrees of regulatory and interest group capture.

Ergo, the GOP more likely to kill the filibuster (but only slightly)
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I'm not sure about Chris's methodology, but his conclusions seem about right.

Regardless, Senate Dems are just not set up to take a radical step like killing the filibuster - on the evidence of the last five years I've been watching them relatively closely.

The GOP might - with a GOP prez with two terms in him.

But then their metanarrative is the Lost Cause - they need it to be a struggle to get corporate bills passed (the notorious bankruptcy bill passed in 2005 started life under late Clinton) to keep the cash registers singing.

And the last thing they want is to make it possible to pass bills favored by their looney wing!

In order to be able to pass progressive legialtion, we must completely annihilate any and all chances we have for ever passing progressive legislation? You assume that the problem is the filibuster when it isn't. The problem is a complete lack of discipline within the Democratic caucus in the Senate -- Reid will not force the conservative members to tow the party line on legislation that will benefit Americans, so the conservatives have no incentive to side with their own party on "crucial" votes.

The GOP passes its legislation and gets its nominees appointed to federal offices because its leaders know how to enforce party discipline within their caucus. At no time during the Bush-Cheney years did Republicans have a filibuster-proof majority, yet they managed to pass 99% of their agenda. Yet because the Democrats refuse to hold their caucus together, it is incumbent upon them to ensure that they have an unrealistic supermajority or else do as you say and remove a procedural tactic that, once they no longer control the Senate, they'll go back to wishing they had.

Here's a novel idea: instead of carping on the filibuster, which Democrats rarely if ever use to block bad legislation anyway and which the GOP doesn't need to overcome for that very reason, why not just throw out all the recalcitrant Democrats and replace them with, (GASP!) actual progressives? (This will be especially important as Reid looks as though his chances of re-election are nil and Dems will be shopping for a new guy to lead them in surrendering without a fight.) Toss the bums out, put in progressives, and then we may see things getting done. Push successfully to end the filibuster, and the only thing that will get done is to hand the GOP even more power than it already has.

"Given the choice between a Republican and someone who acts like a Republican, people will vote for the real Republican all the time." -- Harry S. Truman

Chris Bowers wrote: Democratic Senators vote with Republicans significantly more often than Republican Senators vote with Democrats, making it much easier for Republicans to pass the kind of legislation they want.

The Chris Bowers statement is complete false; the fact is the Democrats in the Senate have voted more often and in greater numbers with their Democratic Majority than the Republicans have voted with their Republican Majority since 2005.

The measure of partisanship in the Senate is the "roll call vote" either Yea or Nay with their Party's Majority recorded as a Party Vote.

A Senator's Party Percent Average is the number of votes with the Party's Majority on a roll call vote recorded as a percentage.

The Senate's Democratic and Republican majorities concurred on 104 of 397 votes (26.2%) during the 111 1st Session (2009)!

The Senate's Democratic and Republican majorities concurred on 136 of 366 votes (37.2%) during the 109 1st Session (2005)!

111 1st Session (2009)!
Bills passed by Democratic majority without the help of the Republican Majority: 11
Bills passed by Republican majority without the help of the Democratic Majority: 0